2004 Holiday Pre-Preview

On-the-scene report from the Holiday Spectacular media event in New York. Plenty of hot info and new photos of the latest from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, and more.

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It's almost that time of year again... time for companies to start getting their ducks in a row for the all-important holiday shopping season.

With Halloween still almost six week away, it's not something most of us want start thinking about just yet. (Including me, hence the extra "pre" in the article title.) But part of any smart company's holiday promo strategy is getting coverage in the magazines that will hit the stands during the peak shopping season, and print magazines usually have very long lead times. With that in mind, 50 tech companies converged on lower Manhattan earlier this week for the "Holiday Spectacular" media event, to show off their holiday wares to the New York press.

Phone Scoop was there, as were Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Research In Motion, and Wildseed. While no earth-shattering announcements were made, everyone had a little something new to show off.

Siemens announced two new phones for the U.S. market: the S66 and CT66. However, as usual for Siemens, both models are simply U.S. versions of models already announced for Europe, with few differences other than frequency bands supported.

Still, the S66 is a very notable model. It sports a very large color display, megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and an RS-MMC memory card slot.

Wildseed was also exhibiting at the event. Their first SmartSkin phone - the Curitel Identity - was recently launched by Cellular One / Dobson, a smaller regional carrier. Additional carriers are pending.

I covered Wildseed's SmartSkin concept in depth in my 3GSM report back in February.

Wildseed's main new product was the first gaming SmartSkin. Featuring the game Mortal Kombat, the skin includes extra buttons that transform the phone into a gaming device. That's one of the really neat aspects of the SmartSkin concept - that new hardware features can be added as easily as snapping on a new faceplate.

And it makes a lot of sense for Wildseed to focus on gaming right out of the gate, since graphics performance is one of the phone's strongest areas. But games are not the only way the Identity puts its graphics prowess to use. In fact, smooth animation and slick transitions are completely pervasive in the phone's menus and interfaces. And in camera mode, the viewfinder has one of the fastest refresh rates I've ever seen.

I asked a T-Mobile territory rep about the P735 and he said "as far as I know we're not going to carry it". This has me kinda worried. I noticed in the pics the phone does say T-Mobile on it and the WAP button has the t-zones logo on it. Is it still scheduled for release with T-Mobile? The release is supposedly before the end of the year. Do you have a more specific date? A month?

i hear about 2 new sanyo phones for sprint, seems to either be really hush hush, or mabey the phones just arent worth talking about, i need a new cell, trying to decide if the new ones are worth the wait